The first night of the Public Theater’s “Shakespeare on the Radio” is up. If you missed it live on WNYC, you can listen to it as a podcast in your app of choice (links here). You can listen live at 8pm ET tomorrow at WNYC’s website.
And by way of preamble, I am off to listen to it right now, but my brilliant friend Isaac Butler did a fantastic podcast series for Slate a few years ago about politics and Shakespeare, and one of the episodes is on Richard II. You may need to subscribe to Slate Plus to listen, but it’s definitely worth it.
Anyhow. I’ve never seen Richard II! I’ve seen RichardIII, but while I’ve read this one it was ages and ages ago. I’m trying to go in cold as much as I can, for that reason.
A few things stuck out to me:
First of all, delighted to hear my friend Vinson Cunningham — theatre critic at the New Yorker — as the host of the show, and to hear all of the interviews with actors and the creative force behind the production. The segment at the end about the essentially moral sense of what theatre can do really stuck with me. I sometimes struggle to articulate how a play is different from a movie, even though I love both forms wholeheartedly. But this seems to me to be a really sharp observation, and something I was trying to articulate when writing about the (admittedly filmed) production of Hamilton (I almost wrote Hamlet) a couple of weeks ago: that the urgency and physical proximity of the performance in theatre does force on the audience something that’s more directly effective than what a movie often does. The screen is gone; this is both high artifice and, somehow, more real than real. You can’t quite get that through radio, but it’s surprisingly intimate. Anyone have more thoughts on that?
The play itself! Well, duels (referring back apparently to Hamilton, my huge apologies, there are other plays) never end well. But while it can seem obviously good to interrupt a duel and prevent unnecessary death, it’s clear the banishments are worse than death in some ways, and of course may result in Gaunt’s death — something he knows, and Shakespeare makes pretty clear.
The ending of the duel by Richard is an interesting way to create that character by shorthand. The play bears his name, but it really doesn’t give much of him to us off the top. The one action makes him seem capricious and self-serving, making decisions with the intent of projecting one image while really covering for his own indecisiveness.
And let’s not forget what the duel is about. Bowlingbroke (Richard’s cousin and, spoiler alert, the future King Henry IV) accuses Mowbray of murdering Richard’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester. Bowlingbroke’s father / Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, thinks Richard did it. When Richard interrupts the duel between Bowlingbroke and Mowbray, he manages to (so to speak) protest too much and also waste a pompous gesture of “goodness.” This guy is all about how he looks, something that often marks the vainglorious in Shakespeare (and, well, life).
And Richard and his buddies think it’s unfashionable and unconscionable that Bowlingbroke treats ordinary people with dignity (“Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench,” for instance). I think, here, of a recurring motif in the HBO show Succession, in which the fabulously wealthy and horrible characters jockeying for the proverbial throne after their media mogul father kicks the can constantly ask one another if various people are “real.” That is, did the person — who has a bad opinion or bad experience or is killed or whatever — matter? Or are they just window-dressing for their own political games?
Near the end, Gaunt, on his deathbed, laments “That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” It comes at the end of lamenting his beloved country’s decline; the footnotes in my Arden edition note that “the notion of England conquered by internal quarrels when foreign invasion would otherwise fail was common in Elizabethan propaganda.”
I don’t precisely know what is going to happen more than broad strokes, but Richard II seems pretty self-involved, and the scene at what I can only think of (I know, erroneously) as “at the bar” near the end shows that he loves flatterers. Would that he was the only leader for whom that will be his downfall.
Finally: This cast, amirite?
Tell me what you’re thinking, knowing, imagining. I’m off to relisten to Isaac’s episode.
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"A shameful conquest of itself."
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The first night of the Public Theater’s “Shakespeare on the Radio” is up. If you missed it live on WNYC, you can listen to it as a podcast in your app of choice (links here). You can listen live at 8pm ET tomorrow at WNYC’s website.
If you missed it, you can also grab the script here. (It’s a deftly condensed version of what’s in the full play, with interstitial narration from Lupita Nyong’o so you can keep track of what’s happening without the visuals.) Here are the episode synopses and a visual guide to the cast and characters.
And by way of preamble, I am off to listen to it right now, but my brilliant friend Isaac Butler did a fantastic podcast series for Slate a few years ago about politics and Shakespeare, and one of the episodes is on Richard II. You may need to subscribe to Slate Plus to listen, but it’s definitely worth it.
Anyhow. I’ve never seen Richard II! I’ve seen Richard III, but while I’ve read this one it was ages and ages ago. I’m trying to go in cold as much as I can, for that reason.
A few things stuck out to me:
First of all, delighted to hear my friend Vinson Cunningham — theatre critic at the New Yorker — as the host of the show, and to hear all of the interviews with actors and the creative force behind the production. The segment at the end about the essentially moral sense of what theatre can do really stuck with me. I sometimes struggle to articulate how a play is different from a movie, even though I love both forms wholeheartedly. But this seems to me to be a really sharp observation, and something I was trying to articulate when writing about the (admittedly filmed) production of Hamilton (I almost wrote Hamlet) a couple of weeks ago: that the urgency and physical proximity of the performance in theatre does force on the audience something that’s more directly effective than what a movie often does. The screen is gone; this is both high artifice and, somehow, more real than real. You can’t quite get that through radio, but it’s surprisingly intimate. Anyone have more thoughts on that?
The play itself! Well, duels (referring back apparently to Hamilton, my huge apologies, there are other plays) never end well. But while it can seem obviously good to interrupt a duel and prevent unnecessary death, it’s clear the banishments are worse than death in some ways, and of course may result in Gaunt’s death — something he knows, and Shakespeare makes pretty clear.
The ending of the duel by Richard is an interesting way to create that character by shorthand. The play bears his name, but it really doesn’t give much of him to us off the top. The one action makes him seem capricious and self-serving, making decisions with the intent of projecting one image while really covering for his own indecisiveness.
And let’s not forget what the duel is about. Bowlingbroke (Richard’s cousin and, spoiler alert, the future King Henry IV) accuses Mowbray of murdering Richard’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester. Bowlingbroke’s father / Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, thinks Richard did it. When Richard interrupts the duel between Bowlingbroke and Mowbray, he manages to (so to speak) protest too much and also waste a pompous gesture of “goodness.” This guy is all about how he looks, something that often marks the vainglorious in Shakespeare (and, well, life).
And Richard and his buddies think it’s unfashionable and unconscionable that Bowlingbroke treats ordinary people with dignity (“Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench,” for instance). I think, here, of a recurring motif in the HBO show Succession, in which the fabulously wealthy and horrible characters jockeying for the proverbial throne after their media mogul father kicks the can constantly ask one another if various people are “real.” That is, did the person — who has a bad opinion or bad experience or is killed or whatever — matter? Or are they just window-dressing for their own political games?
Near the end, Gaunt, on his deathbed, laments “That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” It comes at the end of lamenting his beloved country’s decline; the footnotes in my Arden edition note that “the notion of England conquered by internal quarrels when foreign invasion would otherwise fail was common in Elizabethan propaganda.”
I don’t precisely know what is going to happen more than broad strokes, but Richard II seems pretty self-involved, and the scene at what I can only think of (I know, erroneously) as “at the bar” near the end shows that he loves flatterers. Would that he was the only leader for whom that will be his downfall.
Finally: This cast, amirite?
Tell me what you’re thinking, knowing, imagining. I’m off to relisten to Isaac’s episode.